It was overheated, the more so when the sun shone, but its humid air helped her breathing and she could keep the doors open without getting cold.
The conservatory was huge, crumbling and Victorian, its slanting glazed ceiling supported by rusting Gothic cast-iron pillars up which vines grew from the earthen floor itself, their roots cracking the tiles around them. It was stuffed with potted plants amongst which, near the two sagging doors that opened wide onto a ruined terrace, stood Clare’s bed.
Outside, growing up and across the glass panes of the conservatory, were the thick and still leafless stems of vines and wisteria, and an out-of-control rambling rose. In one corner the wisteria had broken through like the advance party of on invasion force. It felt almost as if the garden was trying to reclaim the house.
The garden itself stretched away outside in all directions, and from where Jack stood it appeared to have no boundaries or any end to it. There was a rough lawn, bumpy and badly mown, with a few formal and once elegant flowerbeds now gone to seed and weed. At a distance of a hundred yards, the ‘lawn’ gave way to shrubs and trees dominated nearest the house by two enormous conifers whose thick straight trunks rose nearly black against the cloudy sky.
They looked like two dark sentinels standing guard at the entrance to a world beyond; or maybe standing guard over Clare Shore against the world outside.
Or both.
Between them Jack could see that the ground beyond was a patch of rough grass around which other trees seemed to be closing in.
Jack hardly recognized Clare lying there among the untidy sheets and blankets and the many pillows scattered on her bed. The last time he had seen her was when he was only eight, and she could still travel. She had then visited him in hospital in London, pushed in a wheelchair by Mrs Foale, who had not yet made an appearance.
Clare’s hair had been dark-brown then and, despite the wheelchair, he vaguely remembered her as cheerful and full of life and energy.
Now her hair was grey and lifeless, her skin pale and shrunken, and she looked so tiny and frail that the pillow propping up her head looked huge.
But then, noticing him at last, she slowly smiled and her dark, still-bright eyes took over from everything else, and he knew her again. His heart leapt because she had always looked at him like that on her visits, as if filled with joy to see him.
‘Hello, Jack,’ she said, raising her right hand weakly from the blankets towards him. He instinctively reached out and grasped it, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Hello, Clare . . .’ he said gently, not sure what to say to her.
She held his hand tight and just looked up at him.
Then: ‘Closer,’ she whispered.
He leant closer and closer still, and very slowly she did something to him that no one else ever had.
She reached her other hand up to his face and cupped one cheek with it, before letting go his hand and using her other one to do the same. Thus holding his face, she started feeling it as if to possess it with her touch.
Her smiling eyes were dark pools of welcome and acceptance.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she murmured very softly. ‘Thank you, Jack.’
What he noticed next was not the bony chill of her touch, or the intensity of her gaze, but an endless tinkling of glass on glass. It was like a far-off waterfall of sound that had drifted in from the garden.
He turned slightly towards the open doors to see if he could catch the source of this sound, but he could not detect one.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she whispered.
He nodded. ‘What are they?’
‘Chimes for our protection,’ she said, ‘to make us safe. They are like the reflections of our lives forever mingling to confuse those who do not love us.’
She turned her head a fraction towards the outside world, then closed her eyes to simply listen and to sigh.
Then she said something strange.
‘You’ll understand about the chimes soon enough, Jack, and though I could explain it’s better you find out for yourself.’
Jack hesitated over what to say next. He didn’t want to patronize or humour her, but Katherine had warned him about her ‘delusions’ and that intrigued him: he wanted to know more. There was something he had not said out in the corridor, something he had never told anyone, not ever. The crash scene often came back to him in dreams and nightmares. Often he was trying to reach Katherine but couldn’t. Other times she was just standing there and he was burning on the ground, people helping him. It had been years before he worked out what was strange about them. Two of them were obviously adults, because they had beards, but neither was any taller than Katherine. Little people.
‘What do they protect us from?’ he asked Clare evenly.
Katherine, who was sitting at the foot of the bed, tensed up.
‘Mum didn’t mean . . .’
Jack raised a hand and she fell silent.
Clare whispered, ‘I don’t know, Jack, but I know I feel safer when I hear them.’
The chimes tinkled in the background.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘You were iller than me. Things are heightened when you’re ill, seeming worse or better than they really are. Ill people are said to get closer sometimes to the other side. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.
Katherine relaxed. She liked the way Jack was listening and the gentle way he talked to her mother.
She took the opportunity to really look at him for the first time. He looked quite fierce and his head jutted forward very slightly to one side. She could see the scar tissue on his neck above his collar, rough and ugly.
You got that saving my life she told herself.
One of Clare’s hands dropped away from him, back to the bed. The other moved on to touch the nape of his neck, and run its fingers over the places where he was burnt, lingering and feeling, caressing the rough, scarred skin.
No one had ever done that either, and whenever they had tried he had flinched. Not now, however, because her touch felt like a healing balm.
Katherine’s hand touched his shoulder. ‘She’ll sleep now,’ she whispered. ‘She stayed awake just for you to come. Now she’ll sleep.’
He looked round at Katherine, and then back at her mother, and then beyond them both into the garden.
The clouds had turned orange with the late-afternoon sun, which now caught the tops of the two conifers and made them seem aflame. He saw the dark rise of a steep chalk ridge beyond the trees. Then a blazing patch of light sped across it, a travelling, racing, run of brightness spilling through a gap in the cloud. It gradually turned the ridge of the Downs bright and pale, until suddenly it turned something that, until now, had been lost in the gloom, bright white and seemingly alive. It was the chalk outline of the White Horse of Uffington: its legs were just simple curves, its single eye bright, its ears pricked, its tail flowing behind it, seeming to be racing through sunlight towards the sky.
Framed between the two tallest trees it shone with startling brightness, but then the sunlight moved on, and the horse faded, until it was no more than a grey shadow.
‘That’s it,’ said Katherine. ‘That’s our horse.’ Her hand touched his arm very lightly as she nodded towards the hill. Then she whispered, ‘She’ll talk to you tomorrow afternoon, that’s her best time. Let her sleep now.’
Jack looked back at Clare and saw she was fast asleep. He let go of her hand after placing it back on the bed and, without any embarrassment, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
‘I’ll look after Katherine always,’ he found himself whispering. ‘From now until the end of time.’
She stirred, half raised one hand towards him, gave a murmur of understanding and turned her head back into sleep.
Neither she, nor Jack, saw Katherine mouthing the words: ‘And I’ll look after him.’
29
HOUSE
‘Mrs Foale’s out late tonight, and she sleeps over the Stables, so you may not meet her till tomorrow morning,’ explained Katherine later. ‘Maybe you want to put your bag in your room upstairs? Come on – I’ll show you.’
The stairs were wide and they creaked. They turned a corner halfway up, which created a little gallery of balustrades from which the hall below was visible. Except there were no lights on, and Katherine was in the habit of not using them unless absolutely necessary.
They went on up the stairs into shadows, the only source of illumination a skylight in the ceiling high above their heads.
Katherine led Jack next down a long corridor which had just a strip of carpet running along the middle, with bare boards on either side. It made the passage look even narrower.
‘My room’s back there, Mum used to sleep here until she couldn’t manage the stairs, and you’re in what’s called the guest room, except we never have any guests.’
‘You have now,’ said Jack.
‘But you’re family,’ said Katherine, without thinking. ‘Well, anyway, something like that. It’s in here.’
She opened the door but didn’t go in because that felt a step too far, now Jack had arrived. She had made up his room with infinite care, cleaning, dusting, polishing, folding and refolding the sheets on his old Edwardian single bed at least three times to get them right.
But now he was here, a disturbing, unfamiliar presence, it was suddenly his space and not hers.
‘Um, well . . . I’ll leave you then. Supper at six-thirty? We can entertain ourselves tonight. Mrs Foale’s made one of her murky stews, so beware.’
He gazed at her, not wanting her to go but unsure how to ask her to stay. The whole day had been weird and he was tired and a bit confused, and there was something about the house – an unsettling feeling of sadness and waiting. ‘Thanks, then. Six-thirty.’
‘There’s a gong, and I’ll bang it. Mum likes to hear the routines, as they help pass her day.’
‘Okay, then.’
Then she hurried away and Jack found himself alone. The room took him by surprise: it was huge compared with what he was used to. The tall casement windows, covered in cracked and peeling cream paint, looked out on to the darkening garden and beyond it to White Horse Hill, now just a dark and lowering mass against a mauve sky. They had shutters folded into the frame on either side.
There was a wooden bed, a bedside table with an old crooked lamp made out of an ornate wine bottle, and a big threadbare rug which covered less than half the black-painted floorboards. A picture of boats on the wall helped it look like a seaside boarding-house room from the Fifties, and made Jack feel he had walked on to the set of a movie produced in an English film studio, story unknown.
There was also a desk by one of the windows, a wardrobe with a door hanging crooked and ajar, a cream light shade with burn marks round the top because at some time in the past it had been fitted with a bulb too powerful and hot for its size.
Jack dropped his bag on the floor and sat down on the bed, and let the gloom descend on him. Except it wasn’t quite like that because, though it got darker inside the room, the sky over the hill got lighter, brighter and redder for a time.
He watched it and heard his own breathing subside.
Today was an ending and a beginning like no other he could remember.
He reached his hand behind him to the bed, which had soft pillows and sheets which were smooth, clean and ironed with carefully turned-over blankets on it. He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, following its cracks to the furthest corner of the room until, his eyes closing, he began to drift off. He fell asleep into familiar nightmare: him on his back in the dark burning, the little girl that once was Katherine standing nearby staring at him, the bearded person coming and coolness on his back and the bang bang bang of . . .
The gong awoke him and he sat up at once, his bag at his feet and still unpacked. He looked around groggily, and saw something he had not noticed before. It was a bunch of flowers, not much more than a spring posy of daffodils and sweet-smelling hyacinths, which Katherine had put it in a jam jar placed neatly on a round crocheted mat to protect the wooden surface beneath.
Next to it was a box of matches and next to that in turn a smaller jar with a tea light in it. Jack lit it and placed it a little way further from the posy but still within the frame of the three-part mirror, so it not only lit up the flowers but was reflected in the mirror.
The posy was bound by threads of dried grass cleverly tied in a bow.
Earlier, Katherine had let slip she saw him as family.
That was one thing, this quite another. He had never in his life been made to feel at home in such a way.
Movement reflected in the glass but he didn’t look around. He saw Katherine silhouetted at the door behind him, watching.
‘I didn’t hear any movement,’ she said, ‘so I thought you might be sleeping. Did I wake you with the gong?’
He nodded, but it didn’t matter whether she had or not; it was the flowers that he was thinking about.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘No one’s ever done something like this for me before.’
‘There’s food on the table, Jack,’ she said nervously, ‘if you’re hungry.’
‘I’m always hungry,’ he said.
‘Come on then,’ she said awkwardly.
He strode along behind her, his steps louder than she was used to in the usually quiet house. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the plant stand at the top of the stairs went flying or Arthur’s umbrella stand in the hall below skittered across the oak floor when they reached it, its contents flying and bashing into the walls and the great front door.
‘You don’t put lights on much, do you?’ he observed.
‘Generally not,’ she agreed, adding, ‘and anyway the bulbs always blow and there’s no one to change them.’
Supper was not murky stew. It was Welsh rarebit and salad with a dressing, and the moment Jack sat at the table Katherine realized it wasn’t nearly enough. He looked like a shaggy lion being offered peanuts.
The truth was she had put Mrs Foale’s murky stew back in the fridge, thinking it too crude and unpalatable-looking for the occasion. She saw now that it would have been perfect.
‘That was starters,’ she lied when the rarebit disappeared and he looked around hungrily, ‘because . . . well . . .’
‘What?’ he asked.
She began laughing.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
She told him about the stew. They both started laughing, like children in a playground, but laughing too from the strong undercurrents that came with being children no more; and with the pleasure of realizing that things were all right.
‘So, do you want some murky stew?’ she asked.
‘Yes!’
She heated him some and left him to begin to devour it, while she tended to Clare.
‘She’s sleeping again,’ said Katherine heavily when she came back.
She sat down without expression.
‘It must be hard for you,’ he said.
She nodded without looking at him and answered, ‘It gets harder. But there are good moments and she’s mostly positive. Doesn’t want to upset me I suppose. Just now she said she could hear us laughing earlier, which she liked. She’s glad there’s new life in the house. Do you want some more?’
Jack nodded and she fetched him some. They began to catch up all down the years. Their voices, now loud, now soft, and their laughter spread throughout the old house, threads of light in darkness reaching into the furthermost corners.
‘I’m sorry about what happened, Jack, you know – not talking for years.’
‘It was my fault too.’
‘I liked the way you talked to Mum.’
‘It wasn’t hard,’ he said.
The angry silence of the years was broken and new trust building. By the time they said good nigh
t they were friends again.
Much later, all lights out, Mrs Foale returned by cab.
She went to check on Clare, who was awake, eyes open.
Mrs Foale turned her over, made sure she was set for the rest of the night.
‘You look better,’ she said.
‘Can you tell the difference? In the house?’
Mrs Foale sat back and considered. ‘Maybe I can. I’ll check the kitchen and come back.’
It was neat as two pins except that the drying-up cloth was hung in a different place. She checked the fridge, then made herself a mug of tea and went back to Clare.
‘Well, well,’ she said, ‘someone round here finally appreciates my murky stews. It’s all gone, every last scrap.’
‘Can you feel the change?’ Clare asked again.
‘Yes, I can. Maybe the house will start coming alive again . . . ?’ said Mrs Foale with a sad smile. ‘I wish Arthur was here.’
Clare nodded, sad too.
Her friend rarely mentioned Arthur these days, but his absence was palpable around the house, he being such a big, alive person. There was a lot about his disappearance that Clare did not understand, not least Mrs Foale’s unwillingness to involve outside authorities in it. Plainly she knew more than she was saying, so Clare had felt it best to say nothing much herself unless the opportunity arose. Now it had.
‘It’s three months now, isn’t it?’
Mrs Foale nodded.
‘And you’ve heard nothing?’
‘Nothing. But . . .’
‘What?’
‘There have never been lies between us or anything left unspoken. So it’s better you ask nothing more. There’s things I can’t say. Please?’
Clare nodded, but not willingly. Katherine missed Arthur too. She did as well. He was father to one, older brother to the other. Now he was gone without any satisfactory explanation.
‘It’s hard not to talk about him,’ said Clare. ‘It feels we’re denying his existence.’
‘Please,’ said Mrs Foale again, unhappily.
‘His going had to do with his work didn’t it?’
‘I . . . really . . . he made me promise not to talk about it.’